The electronics industry is driven by the continual requirements to reduce space and reduce cost. A significant amount of the space and the cost of a populated printed circuit board is in the passive components such as resistors, capacitors and inductors. When systems designers shrink a board, the logical path would be to bury these passive components into the circuit board itself. Companies and laboratories throughout the world have tried to accomplish this but have failed due to either high temperature processing requirements of the materials used to fabricate the components, coefficient of thermal expansion mismatch, or flexure of the board which fractures or distorts the materials used to fabricate the components.
Frequently, electronic circuits contained on printed circuit boards require a very large number of passive components to perform various functions, such as terminating circuits, current limiters or digital attenuators. One method used to increase the density of conductor paths on printed circuit boards has been through the use of multi-layer boards in which multiple layers, each containing etched copper circuitry, are sandwiched together. In addition to the method in which individual printed circuit layers are separately fabricated using, for example, a photolithographic process, and then laminated together, there have been uses of thin, screened-on insulating layers between multiple conductor planes to increase the density of conductors on a circuit board. In the past, multi-layer printed circuit boards having screened-on resistors have been produced. Such circuit boards however did not accommodate other passive components within multiple individual layers of the printed circuit board. Consequently a need exists for a multi-layer printed circuit board and method for manufacturing the multi-layer printed circuit board which accommodates multiple passive components such as resistors, capacitors and inductors within the individual layers of the printed circuit board.